Recipe: Awesome Pound Cake

Awesome Pound Cake

3 cups cake flour
6 large eggs
1 pound butter
1 pound sugar
2 teaspoons of pure vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup buttermilk

Sift the flour into a large mixing bowl. Stir in
the sugar. I use a large spoon for this. Next I add the butter. My grandmother would melt the butter in a pan over slow heat to make it blend easier. You can do this or just let the butter soften at room temperature. Add the eggs, whole. At this point I break out my mixer and begin mixing on slow. I slowly add my buttermilk, and then the vanilla extract. After it is thoroughly stirred, I turn the mixer up to medium for a few minutes, and then finally on high. If the mixture is a little thick I add just a touch more buttermilk. If you don't mix things thoroughly you will have lumps that will form air bubbles in your mixture and leave holes in your finished cake. It was always a matter of pride not to have these air pocket holes in our cakes so we always made sure we got all of the lumps. In the pre-electric-mixer day that involved a lot of whipping the cake by hand. We usually didn't have a hand cranked mixer that worked well, so this involved a large mixing spoon to whip it. Some old timers even counted the number of times they whipped the mixture - sort of made it fun and you didn't notice your arm tiring. Preheat the over to 325 degrees. Take your standard tube cake pan and oil it with
butter. Then lightly flour the oiled pan. Shake
the excess flour from the pan. Pour the mix in, bake the cake for about 1 hour and twenty minutes. Keep looking at how your cake is doing through the oven door but avoid opening the door too much while it is cooking as I have seen this, or jarring a cake, cause it to collapse. When you think it is done, do the toothpick test.
Stick a wooden toothpick into one of the thickest
parts of the cake. If it's dry when you pull it our, the cake is done. Allow the cake to cool 15 or 20 minutes in the pan. Then gently remove it, and stick it on your favorite decorative cake plate.